Inspired by a fascination with initial consonant mutations in Scottish Gaelic, Stewart resorts to several morphological theories to analyze these mutations synchronically. He also examines verb agreement marking in Georgian and gerund formation in Sanskrit. The author aims to demonstrate that a non-concatenative approach to analyzing consonant mutations (focusing on word structure rather than on word order per se) consistently illuminates the morphological functionality and meaning of linguistic elements that do not exhibit behavior that is typical of affixes. In this book, the author intends to develop a new linguistic-centered meta-language for describing and examining morphological data from a grammatical point of view. This point of view emphasizes how the assumptions of morphological theories affect the interaction between syntax, semantics, phonology, and morphology when analyzing word structure.
In chapter 1, Stewart challenges traditional theoretical conceptualizations of the term morphology as the study of units of meaning which either independently or cooperatively convey interrelated messages. The author claims that these conceptualizations impose limitations on the analysis of word formation because lexemes predominate over morphemes in an effort to draw a direct connection between grammar and word meaning. For example, the author clarifies the different grammatical functions of distinct verb forms of the word love (“loves, loved, and loving”, p. 2) in order to contend that traditional morphological theories favor the examination of lexemes (e.g., present tense, past tense, and present progressive tense) rather than morphemes (e.g., the root of the word, the third person singular marker -s, the past participle -ed, and the gerund -ing), which together form lexemes with different grammatical functions. Here, the author's argument could be enhanced by relating language use to lexemes and linguistic morphology to morphemes. This relationship aligns with the author's system of five new theoretical continua for analyzing data sets of word formation in order to prevent analytical limitations on grammatical correctness, regardless of whether language is produced orally or in writing. These continua are sets of binary oppositions (morpheme-based versus word/lexeme-based, formalist versus functionalist, in-grammar versus in-lexicon, phonological formalism versus syntactic formalism, and incremental versus realisational) that allow for unlimited/boundless interconceptual interaction. This type of interaction means that, for example, a lexeme-based theory can focus on grammatical rules (formalist) while also taking into account the grammatical function of words in different contextual situations (functionalist).
Chapter 2 presents 15 different morphological theories in alignment with 15 different continuum tables which help describe the extent to which these theories focus on morpheme-based paradigms or word/lexeme-based paradigms. By using an integrated analysis of binary oppositions (e.g., formalist versus functionalist and in-grammar versus in-lexicon), the author argues that word-based morphology theory is grounded in deciphering the meaning of words and congruency of patterns of language expression primarily via nominal inflection. For example, the author examines the declensions of Estonian nouns, such as hekk ‘hedge’, hekid ‘hedges’, kool ‘school’ and koolid ‘schools’, in order to demonstrate that syncretism—when applied to declensions at the whole-word level—does not adversely affect the grammatical properties of linguistic elements used to form words. Stewart also contends that word syntax theory employs a morpheme-based approach to describe meaning-making patterns of language. He supports this argument by providing examples of left-headed compounding in English (e.g., en-noble) and right-headed compounding in Spanish (e.g., libr-ito) in order to show that percolation should not be restricted to right-handed affix modifications of words. The author expounds on this argument by highlighting Di Sciullo and William's (Reference Di Sciullo and Williams1987) use of prefixation (i.e., multiple prefixes used before a word stem) as a way of changing the semantic/pragmatic quality of words in different contextual situations. The author does not mention suffixation (i.e., multiple suffixes used after a word stem). Examining suffixation in relation to prefixation would have helped strengthen the author's main argument in favor of the aforementioned morpheme-based approach. This is because the combined interaction between prefixes and suffixes attached to the same word stem (e.g., pseudo-pro-establish-ment-ar-ian-ism) illuminates the grammatical composition of words from a formalist point of view. The author champions Blevins’ (Reference Blevins, Booij and van Marle2005) contemporary interpretation of the Word and Paradigm concept in order to conclude that both distinct and similar morphosyntactic properties have an inherent effect on how recurrent patterns of language are described.
In chapter 3, the author applies the morphological theories presented in chapter 2 to the following linguistic phenomena: initial consonant mutations in Scottish Gaelic nouns, verb agreement marking in Georgian, and gerund formation in Sanskrit. The author suggests that construction morphology theory helps instantiate the non-concatenative relationship between mutated and unmutated initial consonant phonemes in Scottish Gaelic. Stewart strengthens this argument by presenting a chart of alternate pairs of initial consonants (e.g., radical: grapheme b, phoneme /p,pv/, as opposed to lenited: grapheme bha /v,vj/, Stewart Reference Stewart, Cruickshank and Millar2013) which helps show that the phonological production of word-initial consonants is directly related to the morphological contexts in which a given consonant appears. The author also presents a paradigm chart (nominative, genitive, dative, and vocative) of four Scottish Gaelic nouns (doras ‘door’, balach ‘boy’, sgoil ‘school’, and clach ‘stone’) and applies a new constructional schema of morphological rules to this chart. This application shows that a consistent pattern of initial consonant mutations is not affected by the semantic properties of Scottish Gaelic words.
With regard to Georgian verbs, Stewart claims that the disjunctivity in marking verb agreement is a result of different factors such as competition between prefix and suffix verb markers (e.g., g- versus v-, and -t versus -s) and morphological rule ordering of subjects and objects. The author bolsters this claim through the lens of autolexical syntax/automodular grammar by presenting a lexeme classification chart of prefix verb markers (i.e., v- and g-) and the verb xedav ‘to see’. This chart demonstrates that the canonical word order S-O-V favors v- over g-, but g- is used more frequently by native speakers in mainstream language contexts.
The author closes chapter 3 by discussing the formation of gerunds in non-finite forms in Sanskrit using the suffixes -tvā and -ya. The author argues in favor of a multiapplication of morphological theories (e.g., A-Morphous Morphology, Distributed Morphology, and Lexical Morphology) in order to show that the appropriate use of the aforementioned suffixes depends on whether a prefix (i.e., a preverb) is attached to the verb root. For example, the preverb apa, which precedes the verb root gam, requires the gerund suffix -ya (apagamya ‘having gone away’), whereas the verb root jñā is followed by the gerund suffix -tvā (jñātvā ‘having known’) without a preverb. This example helps demonstrate that A-Morphous Morphology distinguishes between derivational and compounding features of morphemes (Anderson Reference Anderson1992; Lieber and Štekauer Reference Lieber and Štekauer2014).
Chapter 4 presents the term morphology as a boundless concept that challenges the traditional norms of language description through the identification of differences and similarities involving the interaction between morphosyntactic and morphophonological phenomena. The author illuminates Barðal's (Reference Barðal2008) conceptual model of productivity in order to argue that morphology functions optimally within the context of general schematic processes of language that are primarily controlled by theoretically-based rules in competition with each other. For example, Stewart describes the creation of grammatical (untruthfulness) and ungrammatical words (*unmaskness) via the simultaneous use of two English affixes (e.g., un- and -ness) based on the specific lexical category: the noun (truth) versus the verb (to mask).
This book will be of interest to scholars who examine how morphology interacts with syntax, phonology, semantics, and grammar when applying morphological theories to the analysis of linguistic phenomena. The author's main contribution lies in theoretically-based continua used to describe the manifestation of morphological phenomena. Other scholars have described morphological phenomena without a theoretically-based continuum (Lieber Reference Lieber2016; Lieber and Štekauer Reference Lieber and Štekauer2014). A major strength of this book is the establishment of theoretical profiles of interacting continuum concepts (e.g., formalist and functionalist) that help explain word formation. However, the volume does not include quantitative analyses of native-like language production which could have been used to account for word formation.
